Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (review)

THE JEWISH QUARTERLYREVIEW,XCII, Nos. 1-2 (July-October, 2001) 243-246 GABRIELLASAFRAN. Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire. Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 269. Contemporaryscholarshipequates the development of Jewish culturein TsaristRussia almost entirely with the rise of secular literaturein Yiddish andHebrew.The same kind of canonical thinkinginformsthe exclusive focus on literaturein Russian in the treatmentof Russianliterature.Gabriella Safran'spath-breakingwork deftly eludes the ideological pitfalls of such comfortable distinctions. Her original and importantstudy, Rewriting the Jew:AssimilationNarrativesin the RussianEmpire,serves to remindscholars working on both sides of the Russian-Jewishdivide thatRussia was an empire and that its Jews were an imperial people. Safran argues that the "narrativeof Jewish acculturation"that first developed out of the specific juridical, socio-economic andconfessional determinantsof the Jewish condition in Russia in fact transcendedthe real andmetaphoricconfines of the Pale of Jewish Settlement. Devoted to the imaginaryperegrinationsof the modern Russian Jew as a new literarytype, Safran'sstory offers a unique point of entry into the complicated world of Russian culturalpolitics during the great "unserfment"(raskreposhchenie) of Russian society in the reformingreign of Alexander II. Nearly every history of RussianJewryattributesthe rise of the so-called "Jewishquestion"in post-reformRussia to the increasingpublic resonance of administrativeantisemitism. In contrast, Safranfocuses on a variety of imaginative alternatives both to the polarizing discourse of government decrees and to the rhetoric of conservative Russian publicists. Safran's modern Russian Jew moves beyond the orbit of official xenophobia into the center of a far-reachingdebate aboutthe extent to which an empire so recently and so painfully freed from two hundredyears of serfdom could sustain the radical consequences of individual autonomy. Acculturating Jews, Safranposits, became symbolically attachedto the imperial project of social reform because their efforts to remake themselves into modern Russians both exemplified and mocked the state'sattemptto emancipate a society thatwas busy emancipatingitself. In the life-story of the acculturatingJew, Russian writers discovered a paradigmof humanperfectibility,implicit in the promise of enlightenment that beguiled both reform-erabureaucratsand the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s and 1870s. As hopes gave way to the vicissitudes of history,the partialliberationof the Jew fromthe twin burdensof communalloyalty and 244 THEJEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW divine obedience would come to exemplify the generally "mutable,permutable , approximateandrelative"(p. 189) results of Russian attemptsat selffashioning in the aftermathof emancipation. Safran locates the origin of this tension between extravagantculturalexpectations and the highly contingent , unpredictablesocial consequences of theirfulfillmentin Notes of a Jew (1872-73), a mastertext throughthe mediationof which "thenarrative of Jewish acculturationenteredmainstreamRussianliterature"(p. 62). Writtenin Russian by a notably controversialJewish writernamed Grigorii Bogrov, this sprawling, loosely autobiographicalnovel idealizes the seemingly limitless capacity of the Jewish enlightener (maskil) to transform himself into an "unprecedentedtype of humanbeing" (p. 26). At the same time, Bogrov celebratesthe intractablewill of the Jewishcriminalas a source of inspirationfor an ironic postureof authorialresistanceto the acculturationnarrative ,predicatedupon the assumptionof Jewish degeneracy and rooted in the primal sin of Jewish birth.Safrangoes on to explore the traces of Bogrov's anxiety of origins in the work of Eliza Orzeszkowa, Nikolai Leskov andAnton Chekhov.Confrontinga set of difficulttexts that areaptto makeboth antisemitesandJews blush, Safranprobesthe extentto which these three writerssucceeded in translatingBogrov'sdual-edgedpolemical narrativeof Jewish acculturationinto more subtle literaryregisters. Safran reads Orzeszkowa, Leskov and Chekhov through the prism of their self-conscious "misreading"of Jewish acculturation,in fact and in fiction. Orzeszkowa, "a Positivist and a model Polish patriot"(p. 75), was, according to Safran,deeply invested in the idea of internalJewish reform within the context of her own commitmentto maintainingthe culturalintegrity of the Polish nation in the absence of an autonomousPolish state. Orzeszkowa'sparadigmaticJewish novel, Meir Ezofowicz(1878), contested the dominantnarrativeof Jewishacculturation in which modernJewshitched theirown rising fortunesto Russian state-buildingefforts. She worried,Safransays , thatthe distantglow of St. Petersburgwould temptPoland'sJews to foresweartheir "native"loyalties. The possibility thatPolandmight lose its Jews to Russification suggested a far more troublingprospect-the disintegrationof Polish identityunderTsaristrule. Safran'streatmentof Leskov'senigmatic shortstory,"EpiscopalJustice" (1877), reveals anotherway in which the narrativeof Jewish acculturation could be deployed to destabilize presumptivecategories of self-ascription. On the one hand, the image of the Jewish convert to Orthodoxyembodied for Leskov the radicalpossibility that, emancipatedfrom their tainted origin , Jews could be successfully transformedinto faithful Russians. On the other hand...